Women's News from the Web

The spandex-based controversy has been broiling in the west for years; and it’s not just men policing women’s bodies, women are doing it to themselves

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Biggest ever study of public sector gender pay shows female GPs earn a third less than men

Male doctors in the NHS earn 17% more, on average, than their female peers, the biggest ever study of gender pay in the public sector has found.

Female GPs experience the greatest disparity. They earn, on average, £75,600 – a massive £38,000, or a third, less than the £113,600 average salary among male colleagues.

The aim is to improve the lives of women with the painful condition. The burden to do so should not fall on their shoulders

Every day this month I have opened my social media to an ocean of yellow women’s surgical constellations and words of hope and frustration. It is Endometriosis Awareness Month, a useful time to reflect on what Australia has achieved in supporting women with the condition. And what we still need to do.

The national action plan for endometriosis was officially launched mid last year by the federal health minister, Greg Hunt. The government promised $4.7m towards implementing the priorities outlined in the plan. This consisted of a $2.5m grant program under the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF), $1m for a steering group to oversee the plan’s implementation, $1m to educate GPs and health professionals about endometriosis, and $200,000 to Jean Hailes for Women’s Health for an awareness campaign for women.

Changing Lives to receive £1m to help victims in Rotherham, Newcastle and elsewhere

Victims of sexual exploitation scandals in Rotherham and Newcastle are among those who will benefit from this year’s tampon tax disbursement.

The charity Changing Lives will receive £1m to support vulnerable women groomed by gangs for sexual exploitation in the north-east and Yorkshire, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has announced.

Women are on trial for unspecified charges relating to human rights work

Eleven female Saudi Arabian activists have appeared in court in Riyadh for the latest hearing in their trial on unspecified charges relating to their human rights work and contacts with foreign journalists and diplomats.

Reporters and foreign diplomats were barred from entering the courtroom and escorted from the building despite petitioning the authorities to attend the trial, which has drawn sharp criticism in the west.

The lack of recognition for complex PTSD by the psychiatric establishment means it is difficult for sexual abuse victims who might suffer from it to receive the right diagnosis

Suppose, for the sake of a thought experiment, that a new psychological disorder was discovered. It is supported by dozens of studies and recognized by some of the world’s leading psychiatrists and psychologists, but not by the North American psychiatric establishment. And let’s say the refusal to accept this new disorder had devastating consequences for #MeToo survivors.

That claim is asserted by a growing number of sexual abuse victims, psychiatrists and psychologists worldwide.

Its latest campaign ‘Cheese for Change’ is a river of dairy pouring through a chasm of staggering misjudgment

“The aim of marketing,” explained the corporate guru Peter Drucker, “is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself”.

If that’s the theory, I am more than intrigued to understand the practice which informed one Australian organisation’s recent “Cheese for Change” campaign.

Policy bans aid going to foreign groups that support abortion rights as secretary of state Pompeo says: ‘This is decent and right’

The Trump administration has expanded its ban on funding for groups that conduct abortions or advocate abortion rights, known as the global gag rule, and has also cut funding to the Organisation of American States for that reason.

Related: How Trump signed a global death warrant for women | Sarah Boseley

Space agency blames shortage of outerwear after first-of-its-kind mission falls through

Nasa’s plans for the first all-female spacewalk have fallen through – at least in part because the agency doesn’t have enough spacesuits that fit the astronauts.

What should have been a giant leap for womankind has turned into a stumble after Nasa said on Monday night that they will only have access to one correctly sized spacesuit top by Friday when the walk was scheduled. One of the two women on the mission, Anne McClain, will now have to give up her place to a male colleague.

There needs to be serious, urgent research into better saddles for female cyclists, says Hannah Dines, who has endured years of pain and swelling caused by friction as she rides

The plastic surgeon, in that particularly endearing way of surgeons, was trying to reassure me that although he had never operated on an endurance cyclist before, he had seen “presentations” like mine. “I’ve seen chronic inflammation and long-term trauma to the vulva like this. You know …” he paused, “in patients who compulsively rub up against bedposts.” Silence.

I decided against explaining that the relationship with my bike saddle did not, perhaps, deserve to be in among the psychiatric cases in his cognitive filing system. However, he had a point. While there is no love lost between me and the necessary evil that is my saddle, I have continued to train, despite huge amounts of destruction to my body, pain and trauma.

Cosmetic surgeons are concerned that a growing number teenagers are trying to stave off wrinkles before they arrive – so what or who is really to blame?

We’re living in an age where messages of “self-love” are everywhere: from high-street stationery to pop music. Yet young women’s self-esteem is abysmally low, with cosmetic surgeons becoming increasingly concerned at a spike in girls as young as 13 getting Botox. Doctors cite mental health problems and, of course, the ever looming bogeyman of “celebrity culture” as being responsible. “Girls are having treatment at an age when they don’t need it,” Dr Nick Lowe, the dermatologist who helped to pioneer the injections in the 1990s, told the Sunday Times. “We’re seeing body dysmorphic syndromes and a terrible loss of self-confidence. They’re convinced that looking like a celebrity is going to make them happier and more successful.”

While it is particularly troubling that tweens are smiting smile lines before they can feasibly form, the very idea that Botox is “needed” at any time in a woman’s life is as much a part of the problem as anything else. Young girls are trying to preempt a grim reality: that their worth dwindles as their age increases. Yet it seems that the horror of an older woman is still greater than that of needles jutting from baby faces – there are still no legal age restrictions on Botox and the industry remains woefully unregulated.

Forget about gleaming worktops and shiny showerheads. Life is for living, not for tidying your cutlery tray

The world is a mess. Pollution and all that eco-jazz. Your body is also a mess, full of toxins that need cleansing. Your skin is ungodly and needs a good hot-cloth treatment and expensive cream. And your house? Well, it’s an absolute tip.

Foxes have eaten my recycling, so rubbish is strewn all over the road. A card was popped through my door offering to steam my carpets, a treatment that seemed more expensive than buying some new carpets. The last man who cleaned my windows disappeared after a complicated divorce and, quite frankly, I can’t be bothered any more.

Supreme court president calls for full equality at event for centenary of women in law

At least half of the judiciary should be women, Britain’s most senior judge has said.

Speaking at an event in the supreme court to mark the centenary of women’s entry into the legal profession, Brenda Hale, president of the supreme court and the first woman to take on that role, made the call for full gender equality across the judiciary.

Conway plays an integral role in Trump’s racist and misogynist agenda. She’s no feminist – she’s simply a bad person

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Anti-trafficking campaigner Onjali Q Raúf was inspired to write adventure story The Boy at the Back of the Class by a Syrian mother and baby she encountered in a Calais camp

Onjali Q Raúf has won the Waterstones children’s book prize with her debut novel, which she wrote while recovering from life-saving surgery.

Raúf is founder of the charity Making Herstory, which fights the trafficking and enslavement of women. After botched surgery for endometriosis left her vomiting and in crippling pain, she was told she had only three weeks to live. Further major surgery saved her life, but forced Raúf to spend three months recovering in bed.

Her ambition was harnessed to a kind of patriotism and an ideal of serving society that is much less widely believed in today

In many ways Mary Warnock, whose death was announced on Thursday, represented the best of Britain’s ruling class as it was between the war and the rise of Margaret Thatcher.

The kind of tough-minded, realistic and self-confident liberalism that she embodied was once a quality that foreigners admired in Britain. It was elitist and not particularly democratic: she and her husband rose to the very top of the Oxbridge system, he as vice-chancellor of Oxford University, she as the head of colleges in both universities. When I went to see her in her semi-retirement, in a village on the edge of Savernake Forest, Wiltshire, she was unashamed about collecting her attendance allowance from the House of Lords. She needed the money, she said, and she earned it – she did the work.

Nicola Kavanagh says crude criticism of Messenger may be fuelled by fear of the unknown

An actor who was the inspiration behind a giant bronze sculpture of a female figure has described her sense of awe at the scale of the piece, and suggested crude criticism of it may be fuelled by fear of the unknown.

Nicola Kavanagh said she found the 7-metre-high, 9.5-tonne statue, Messenger, which was delivered in suitably dramatic fashion to the Theatre Royal Plymouth this week, striking and beautiful.

Women from Kachin minority are allowed to go home only if they leave baby behind, says HRW report

Burmese and Chinese authorities are turning a blind eye to a growing trade in women from Myanmar’s Kachin minority, who are taken across the border, sold as wives to Chinese men and raped until they become pregnant, a report claims.

Some of the women are allowed to return home after they have given birth, but are forced to leave their children, according to an investigation by Human Rights Watch, titled Give Us a Baby and We’ll Let You Go.

Sweeping the subject of working mothers under the carpet only implies there isn’t a problem

There are times in every parent’s life when, however much they try to avoid it, the professional and the domestic messily collide. It happened to me a few years ago when, during a teachers’ training day, I took my seven-year-old with me to interview Joan Collins over lunch. Collins was delighted at her presence and ordered her a giant bowl of ice-cream. However, halfway through the conversation, she suddenly looked startled, fumbled under the table for a bit, and then pulled out a sticky, pink-spattered Chanel shoe. “I do believe dear Lily has dropped ice-cream in my shoe,” she announced, looking a little pained.

Related: It is a scandal that working mothers are 40% more stressed than other people | Chitra Ramaswamy

Cameras were set up in hair dryer holders and wall sockets in 10 cities, say prosecutors

Police in South Korea have arrested two men for secretly filming 1,600 hotel guests and streaming the footage live online, in the latest voyeurism scandal to hit the country.

The suspects, who have not been named, set up secret cameras in 42 rooms at 30 hotels in 10 South Korean cities between November last year and the start of this month, media reports said.